Documentation severely lacking in several areas
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Key: DOCU-57
URL: http://jira.magnolia.info/browse/DOCU-57
Project: Documentation
Issue Type: Improvement
Reporter: Philip Schlesinger
Assignee: Gregory Joseph
I signed up yesterday for the 60 day EE trial after seeing this on the Magnolia
website:
"Customers of Magnolia Enterprise Edition receive additional documentation upon
purchase. The documentation for Magnolia Enterprise Edition includes detailed
information on all added functionality.
Please contact us for further information"
(source: http://www.magnolia.info/home/community/documentation.html )
So I clicked the link and asked for the documentation. Here was the response I
received back:
"As we cannot find you in our POC records, may I ask why you are asking?
Regards, Boris [Kraft, CEO, Co-Founder, Magnolia Americas, Inc.]"
I responded back:
"I just signed up for your 60-day trial yesterday and I'm finding the online
documentation and mailing lists severely lacking. I'm hoping this 'additional
documentation' will help answer my questions."
Boris's response:
"Please be so kind and add in the most specific way possible what you are
missing as a task to jira, so that we can update our documentation accordingly.
We have seen many successful projects and happy clients with less than the
existing documentation, but people have different expectations, and we are
working on meeting them."
Alright Boris, here's the constructive criticism that you're seeking:
I am currently evaluating open-source JCR-based CMS solutions. I need to know
if a CMS package does the following:
* Does it store the following:
o XML (including metadata extraction upon check-in and searching of
that XML metadata)
o Binary Files
* Does it permit versioning, and if so, how does it work?
* Does it offer multiple "spaces"?
* How do the User and Group Permissions work? What types of authentication
servers can it use? Can it differentiate within a single group between those
users who have read-write privileges and those users who have read-only
privileges?
* Does it permit easy purging of "expired" files - preferably via automatic
means?
* What types of replication / clustering does it permit?
* What are the backend database choices?
* How does it do a consistency check between the database and the files to
make sure (a) orphaned files do not occur, and (b) files are not deleted
without updating the database?
* Is there a web service option? What is the web service API? Is there
sample Java code using this web service API?
* Is there a Java API for an embedded server? Is there sample Java code
using this embedded server?
The first CMS I looked at was Alfresco. Alfresco has VOLUMINOUS documentation
- so much so that it's very difficult to browse. But if I google the various
topics I listed above, I quickly found what I needed.
Magnolia was the second CMS at which I looked. You folks need far more
documentation. As an example, regarding my question of versioning, Google
searches failed, so I had to hunt in the user-list to find the following
stashed in the middle of threads (and it took me a while to find the message
that described how to enable it in the documents section):
* here's how to enable it for the Documents section:
http://www.nabble.com/Re%3A-DMS-%22Upload-new-version%22---where-is-the-version--p18708676.html
* Here's how to enable it for the webpages:
http://www.nabble.com/Re%3A-Versioning-not-working-p16858909.html
Compare that with Alfresco - this information was at the top of Google searches
for "Alfresco versioning":
* Alfresco will do this:
http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Versioned_Directories and
http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Versioning_Behaviour
Do you see the difference?
I still have three open queries in the user-list:
http://www.nabble.com/Replication---clustering-td19080762.html
http://www.nabble.com/XML-Metadata-Extraction-for-searching--td19080480.html
http://www.nabble.com/Can-one-set-Magnolia-to-expire-files-automatically-after-a-specified-time-period--td19080532.html
The answer I received on that last query is not what I wanted to hear.
Automated expiration of documents should be a standard feature, not something I
need to write and debug myself.
Alfresco appears to meet our needs right now, especially in the documentation
department. With Magnolia, I'd have a lot more work to do to get it in shape,
praying to G-d that I found the bugs in my code before we went live. I hope
this will help y'all get a better picture of what your users need.
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